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When Ivan Schwab walked onstage decked out in a woodpecker headdress, he knew he was going to get a few laughs. After all, it's not every day that someone does research explaining why woodpeckers don't get headaches.
Schwab's project and nine others were "honored" Thursday at this year's 16th annual Ig Nobel Prizes in Cambridge, Mass. The awards, whose name is a pun on "ignoble," are meant to recognize research that first makes people laugh, then think. This year, prizes were awarded for out-of-the-ordinary research such as why dry spaghetti doesn't break in half and how a finger up the rectum can cure the hiccups.
"Most prizes out there award the best or the worst, but for the Ig Nobel, it doesn't matter whether something is important or irrelevant," says award creator Marc Abrahams.
"Some of this (research) hits you in the head in a nice way. Those people ought to have some kind of official recognition."
The 90-minute ceremony, held at Harvard and produced by the science humor magazine Annals of Improbable Research, included a mini-opera and paper-airplane-throwing audience members.
Schwab, 58, of the University of California-Davis, researched how woodpeckers manage to bang their heads against trees up to 12,000 times a day without getting a concussion or having their eyes pop out of their heads.
"This isn't research so exotic that it can't be understood," Schwab says. "This is not the Nobel Prize, after all."
Other Ig Nobel winners:
*Nutrition. Wasmia Al-Houty and Faten Al-Mussalam for showing that dung beetles are picky eaters.
*Acoustics. D. Lynn Halpern, Randolph Blake and James Hillenbrand for trying to learn why people are irritated by the sound of nails scraping on a blackboard.
*Mathematics. Nic Svenson and Piers Barnes for calculating the number of photographs you have to take to ensure nobody in a group will have their eyes closed.
*Literature. Daniel Oppenheimer for his report "Consequences of Erudite Vernacular Utilized Irrespective of Necessity: Problems with Using Long Words Needlessly."
*Medicine. Francis Fesmire, Majed Odeh, Harry Bassan and Arie Oliven, who published studies titled "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage."
*Physics. Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch for their study of why, when you bend dry spaghetti, it usually breaks into more than two pieces.
*Chemistry. Antonio Mulet, Jose Javier Benedito, Jose Bon and Carmen Rossello for their study "Ultrasonic Velocity in Cheddar Cheese as Affected by Temperature."
*Biology. Bart Knols and Ruurd de Jong for showing that the female malaria mosquito, Anopheles gambiae, is equally attracted to the smells of Limburger cheese and of human feet.
*Peace. Howard Stapleton for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellent device, which makes an annoying noise designed to be audible to teens, not to adults.
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